Home of the 2026 BMW Championship: Bellerive Country Club
In the St. Louis suburb of Town and Country sits a course that was built for one purpose: to host a national championship. Bellerive Country Club was carved out of Missouri farmland by Robert Trent Jones Sr. at the height of his powers, and it announced itself so loudly that the U.S. Open arrived just five years after opening day. Sixty-six years later, it's still one of American golf's great examination halls. Long, tree-framed, and defended by some of the biggest greens in championship golf.
Fast Facts
Year Opened: 1960
Accessibility: Private
Architect: Robert Trent Jones Sr. (renovations by Rees Jones)
Par: 72 (71 for championship play)
Yardage: 7,547
The Land and The Vision
Robert Trent Jones Sr. designed to a credo: a difficult par, an easy bogey. Bellerive is that idea at full scale. He stretched the course to lengths that were almost unheard of in 1960, framed the fairways with trees and bunkers so the intended line is never in question, and then built enormous, gently rolling putting surfaces that turn a simple-looking approach into a genuine problem. A creek winds through the property and touches nine holes. The greens sit up, so short misses roll away and anything above the hole is a nervous putt. It didn't take long for the place to earn a nickname: the Green Monster of Ladue.
There's very little disguise here and very little mercy. No blind shots to memorize, no clever bailouts to discover. The test is whether you can hit the shot you know you need to hit, over and over, for four hours. The par-3 6th is the purest expression of it: in the 1965 U.S. Open it played to a 4.03 stroke average, meaning the best field in the world averaged a bogey. The closing stretch, holes 14 through 18, is known to members as The Ridge, and it has decided more than one championship.
Championship Moments
1965 U.S. Open
At 7,191 yards, Bellerive was the longest course in U.S. Open history to that point. It was the first Open contested over four days and the first televised in color — officials went as far as spraying the 17th and 18th greens a deeper green for the cameras. Gary Player beat Australia's Kel Nagle in a Monday playoff to become, at 29, only the third man to complete the career Grand Slam. Then he gave every dollar of the purse away: $5,000 to cancer research in his mother's memory, $20,000 to the USGA for junior golf.
1992 PGA Championship
Nick Price won at 278 (–6), three shots clear of four runners-up, for the first major of a career that would produce two more over the next two years.
2018 PGA Championship
The 100th PGA Championship gave Bellerive its defining modern moment. Brooks Koepka closed with a 66 to post 264, the lowest 72-hole total in the championship's history. Tiger Woods shot a 64 — his best final round in any major — and finished alone in second as the St. Louis crowd came apart behind him.
Next Week: The BMW Championship Returns
Bellerive hosts the BMW Championship August 20–23 as the second stop of the FedExCup Playoffs, and the club's first Playoffs event since 2008. The top 50 players in the standings arrive with the Tour Championship field on the line.
GOLF+ players can take on Bellerive the same week the world's best do. Same holes, same problems, same greens. It's the rare chance to watch a tournament on a course you've actually played, and to find out how your score stacks up against a 50-man field playing for a shot at the FedExCup.
Beyond next week, Bellerive isn't going anywhere: the Presidents Cup arrives in 2030. This is a course that keeps getting handed the sport's biggest weeks, and it keeps delivering them.